Since when became 60fps gaming a must

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

60fps isnt exclusive to pc, many console games since the plsystation2 were running at 60fps

 

[mechtech]

I remember in 2006 I started my first own desktop PC with a ATi x300SE GPU, at that time I was happy I could play GTA SA.
Lateron I did an upgrade to ATi X1600XT, playing NFS games and GTA SA, Farcry and don't remember what else I was playing.
Later on some more GPU upgrades and so on.
I wasn't really focusing on fps at the time, I even could play Crysis at one moment.

When did people start with saying/wanting you need 60 fps for gaming. (probably 60 @ 1280x1024 at that time)

Were you able to play at 60fps gaming on your first PC.

Nope, I was able to do 75fps, at least I think, I can't remember now TBH.

Hmm I think it was a 17" crt 1024x768. Year 2003. AMD A64 3200+ S754, 1 stick 512MB ddr-400, and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB vid card. Game HL2 and CSS. I remember doing the CSS benchmark, but I can't remember the fps from that long ago.

ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card

ATI’S RADEON 9700 PRO HAS been a resounding success, capturing the leads in both graphics technology and performance for ATI upon its introduction last fall, and holding the crown to...

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lol wow

 

[Bomby569]

60fps isnt exclusive to pc, many console games since the plsystation2 were running at 60fps

60ish, 60 sometimes, 60 if you don't count the spikes, etc...

and i love consoles, my last one was a 360 but i do like the concept and i still game at friends and especially my brother lends me his. But that claim man, that is really so not true. Maybe with the new ones, i never played with neither of them. But older generations, no.

 

[thewan]

I remember in 2006 I started my first own desktop PC with a ATi x300SE GPU, at that time I was happy I could play GTA SA.
Lateron I did an upgrade to ATi X1600XT, playing NFS games and GTA SA, Farcry and don't remember what else I was playing.
Later on some more GPU upgrades and so on.
I wasn't really focusing on fps at the time, I even could play Crysis at one moment.

When did people start with saying/wanting you need 60 fps for gaming. (probably 60 @ 1280x1024 at that time)

Were you able to play at 60fps gaming on your first PC.

Since LCD monitors fixed at 60Hz started existing. Unlike you, the majority of humans perceive anything not synced with a refresh rate as "rubbish". You must be on of those minorities that can't perceive things like tearing and stutters and other artifacts caused by fps that is not synced with the refresh rate of a LCD monitor. I know some friends IRL that are like this. I on the other hand am too sensitive to all this, I cant stand even the slightest stutter, tearing etc caused by this problem. Its all in the human eye. Every individual life is different, thats what makes life so interesting. But there are common traits that majority of life have and one of those is the human perception of moving objects on a screen, especially not CRT screens, hence the 60FPS rule. It fixes the above mostly and that drives up customer satisfaction.

 

[P4-630]

Since LCD monitors fixed at 60Hz started existing. Unlike you, the majority of humans perceive anything not synced with a refresh rate as "rubbish". You must be on of those minorities that can't perceive things like tearing and stutters and other artifacts caused by fps that is not synced with the refresh rate of a LCD monitor. I know some friends IRL that are like this. I on the other hand am too sensitive to all this, I cant stand even the slightest stutter, tearing etc caused by this problem. Its all in the human eye. Every individual life is different, thats what makes life so interesting. But there are common traits that majority of life have and one of those is the human perception of moving objects on a screen, especially not CRT screens, hence the 60FPS rule. It fixes the above mostly and that drives up customer satisfaction.

I mean I like my games as smooth as possible these days, small hickups annoy me, I have a higher standard these days, using a G-Sync monitor.

 

[wolf]

It's true that I've certainly had a good time playing games far below 60fps, below 30 even with some amazing N64 games, but I'd call 60+ fps the norm now for a hell of a long time, at least 15 years, maybe 20?

I suppose it's quite a personal thing too, but motion fluidity and clarity mean a lot to me, the more the better at least to some extent. A big factor for my love of video games is immersion, I want to lose myself in the game world as deeply as possible, and a choppy/low/inconsistent framerate can really hinder that.

Right now I'd say on my current setup anything around or over about 75fps feels very very smooth, obviously still increasing as fps climbs. Some experiences however are tailored, or at least quite well suited to a 60 or even 30fps cap, especially if your monitor has the means to make that framerate look extra smooth with low framerate compensation, or maybe BFI or other similar techniques. I can certainly deal with those when they come up, most recent example is probably It Takes Two played at a locked 4k60. The key there for me is the lock, it has to be a perfect frametime graph or the immersion can be broken. Again this depends on the viewing medium, VRR can pick up those dips and do the visual smoothness heavy lifting so to speak, but they can still be noticed.

Am I picky? I suppose so. And it all started with an old CRT that iirc could do 1600x1200 @60hz, and increasingly higher hz up to maybe 85 or 90hz at lower res? Wish I still had that for some modern retro testing.

 

[anfazi54]

Back when i was kid, litteraly if my pc can run the games i'am just happy with it, lol

 

[droopyRO]

Yeah, 22 years ago my folks got (me) our first PC. I did not know a anything about it. Zero, not one thing. When a friend of my dad's finished installing it, i stood there like a monkey looking at it. Not knowing what to do with it. A few weeks later my first games were run in software mode. The frame rate was probably around 15-30 fps range.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Yeah, 22 years ago my folks got (me) our first PC. I did not know a anything about it. Zero, not one thing. When a friend of my dad's finished installing it, i stood there like a monkey looking at it. Not knowing what to do with it. A few weeks later my first games were run in software mode. The frame rate was probably around 15-30 fps range.

Ugh, software mode... *shudders*

No clue what kind of framerates the Voodoo Banshee in my first PC produced, but I do remember that Unreal Tournament looked fantastic in Glide mode. Half-Life did pretty well in OpenGL. Both were hot garbage in software.

 

[robot zombie]

For me >60fps gaming is good for action. You have this camera turning all of the time, lots of horizontal movement. When the animation steps are shorter/smaller, there's less of a ghosting/motion blur effect on objects moving across the screen. When I lock my panel to 60hz and run vsync (or a <60fps-locked) game, I can see that little blur on everything when the camera turns, as well as with things moving on a steep horizontal axis at high speed. It wears me down and honestly just feels bad. For slower games, it can be fine. A game like Plague Tale, for instance, feels okay at 60fps. Though even there, it gets at me from time to time. Playing something like Control at 60fps gives me a headache because of the fast camera movement you're constantly doing and the way Jesse zips around. Things just become kind of a blurry mess when there is a lot happening. My eyes get tired of trying to track all of the smudgy stuff flying around the screen. When I play that same game at >100fps, it's like a revelation man! I feel like I can open my eyes fully and focus intently on the enemies and their movements. I feel much more connected to the action - I move more calmly and generally get around combat with much more ease. I play for a solid hour longer before taking a break. This may sound crazy, but it actually feels noticeably slower, yet still time-accurate. I play more aggressively, because I'm freer to whip the camera around 180 degrees without feeling like my eyes are glazing over in that split-second. Kind of like in the movie "Limitless"

My assumption has always been that the reason for this is that the game doesn't have enough frames to render the super-fast animations more smoothly. The faster they are, the 'choppier' they will be when examined frame-by-frame. Each frame may be clear, but without enough information, they appear blurry to you in action simply because the transitions rendered by the animation are choppier and perhaps even less 'accurate.' From 30 to 60, all actively rendered animations have 2x the steps, which will make them appear smoother when you try to track them directly with your eyes because the steps from frame to frame are smaller. It's filling in more of the blanks with real information, rather than making your brain quickly guess at a lower info-resolution. This is something I expect most people will be able to pick up on. It gets harder at higher frame rate transitions, but I get the impression that many other people notice the same transition happening further up, even if they're not thinking to describe it in this way. It's less about 'seeing' the faster frame rate, and more about how the faster frame rate affects what the game renders from frame to frame. I don't think you need to 'see' in 120fps to appreciate the effect that 120fps has on the rendering of programmed animations that calculate positioning of meshes pre-rasterization. More granularity in the math before the geometry is rasterized seems to help with motion smoothness.

This isn't real life, where things aren't animated and essentially move in an infinite amount of 'steps.' With an infinitely good way of capturing moving images, you could subdivide the motion of objects infinitely and each subdivision would align perfectly with the next. The information is there. Not possible for a video-game reality to behave like that. A camera in real life might take that infinitely-divisible motion and chop it into 60ths, and that can look quite smooth. But that's because reality is constantly 'rendered' at near-infinite resolution in all regards. The 'frames' also pace perfectly evenly. Time isn't like, fluctuating in ms increments as someone say, swings a baseball bat. You're drawing from a much larger pool of info and trimming it with near-perfect uniformity via video capture tech. With a video game, WYSIWYG, however many frames you got over say, the past minute was the whole reality. And it's nowhere near as consistent as the physical one. Those inconsistencies and gaps in information force you to fill them in. In 24fps films, this is good, as it feels more realistic when imagination works in tandem (though with modern stuff we get that lovely judder from the mismatch with TV refresh rates.) But in games where every little bit of movement counts, you want to be able to see that movement as clearly as possible and not make your brain have to guess at what's actually happening. I'm not looking for an impression of motion - I need to see the actual motion that is there. I am consciously dialing-in on specific movements. When I do that at 60 (perhaps an enemy is running horizontally across the screen at close range and high speed and I lock my eyes on them,) I can *feel* my eyes working hard to track it, and the details of the character are hard to discern, particularly appendages. This is reduced the higher the frame rate is, for me.

I think of it all in terms of information density. In static visual art, there is often a huge benefit to working in higher resolutions than needed for display or printing. The images always look better when they start off with more information than they need rather than less, or just enough. Some processing effects even run better at stupid-high resolutions, because the artifacts are pushed down to smaller bits of info relative to the total information in the image. So when taken to size, they will be far less obvious. DLSS even works this way. The mistakes it makes in drawing the images are less obvious when it draws them really big, and then scales them way down.

I think this might even make temporal aliasing less of an issue as well. TAA games seem rougher on my eyes at lower frame rates. The ghosting from 'not-moving' to 'moving alot' is somehow less tiresome at higher frame rates. Same with DLSS.

I dunno, just something that's been bouncing in my head as I've worked my way into bumping fps over these past couple of years. I never thought it could make a difference, but now, I can't un-see the 60fps psuedo-motion-blur effect that happens in fast-paced games. 30fps is actually kind of unthinkable for modern games to me. The images have too much detail that gets smudgy with motion. I can still go back and play old console games locked and it doesn't bother me much, if at all. But the images themselves already have less detail for that kind of stuff to land on. Add to that the natural blurriness of playing those on either a CRT (which also had that latency advantage) or scaled on a modern backlit display, and it sort of gets hidden among the many other things clouding total information resolution. As games pack more and more visual information on the screen at higher resolutions, with beefier CPUs in use to fit more action in each moment, the lack of smoothness in rendered animations at low to medium frame rates becomes more apparent.

 

[gffermari]

When I was kid, I was happy if my pc could just run the game in any settings.
Now, I don't easily compromise on the level of graphics but I do not mind playing slightly under 60fps or if there are a few stutters.

That's because I play mostly SP games....

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

30fps is actually kind of unthinkable for modern games to me.

I see your 30 FPS and raise you my AC: Origins rates:

Ok, an explanation is due. Apparently Origins has an issue with Nvidia drivers when water is involved, causing the game to lock up. I attempted to use one of the driver versions that actually works, and nearly killed my GPU entirely... Anyways, I have to disable my dGPU in my laptop I am using for the moment (doing some creative cooling in my PC) and do my swimming on iGPU.

 

[Kissamies]

60fps isnt exclusive to pc, many console games since the plsystation2 were running at 60fps

50fps (PAL) here My eyes do not miss that 50Hz flickering on PAL CRTs. Luckily we got 60Hz too with those modern flatscreens.

But damn I remember playing NFS Underground with GF4 Ti 4200, it dropped to 17fps on worst scenarios. After I upgraded to 9700 Pro, the framerate basically doubled on those tunnels. Still no stable 60fps though.

 

[eidairaman1]

50fps (PAL) here My eyes do not miss that 50Hz flickering on PAL CRTs. Luckily we got 60Hz too with those modern flatscreens.

But damn I remember playing NFS Underground with GF4 Ti 4200, it dropped to 17fps on worst scenarios. After I upgraded to 9700 Pro, the framerate basically doubled on those tunnels. Still no stable 60fps though.

I cranked the details to max on that card at 1280x1024, it proved to me the xb was a fx 5200 by detail level (fx5200 crawled if details were enabled)

 

[Kissamies]

I cranked the details to max on that card at 1280x1024, it proved to me the xb was a fx 5200 by detail level (fx5200 crawled if details were enabled)

IIRC I had an Athlon XP 2600+ @ 2.33 back then so I guess the CPU wasn't a bottleneck either.

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

I've always prioritized at least 60 fps in games. Though I think it's because I always fiddled with graphics settings to disable or lower barely noticeable settings.

Tesselations are gone first cause I barely notice the refined textures.

Texture Filtering always highest since it gives some depth to the textures.

Post-processing options like motion blur, vignette, camera lens flare, depth of field get the axe too. They're pretty lightweight but fuck those effects.

Texture quality/memory depends on the VRAM available.

AA depends on the quality. Always SMAA or TAA over FXAA. But if they're too blurry I'd rather play without AA and just supersample the resolution.

Shadow or Shadow Resolution is at least medium. Sometimes Low setting just deletes shadows. While I don’t care about shadow quality, it gives valuable info about enemies. Also some games simulate trees moving by wind. So moving shadow gives an authentic feeling. Don't care about high quality Nvidia GameWorks soft shadows since it’s indistinguishable to low quality low resolution shadow during gaming.

Lighting, Reflections and Ambient Occlusion is dependent on GPU budget and perceived quality. Sometimes God-rays are just too good to ignore. Sometimes reflection makes every surface like cheap mirrors. Sometimes there's no obvious difference between SSAO and HBAO/HDAO. Left to my discretion.

Ultimately I always fiddle with the graphics and as a byproduct I don’t play anything under 60 fps unless it’s locked to 30 but even then begrudgingly. Cause I can physically feel the input delay in sub-60 fps situations. Makes my skin crawl.

 

[Kissamies]

I've always prioritized at least 60 fps in games. Though I think it's because I always fiddled with graphics settings to disable or lower barely noticeable settings.

Tesselations are gone first cause I barely notice the refined textures.

Texture Filtering always highest since it gives some depth to the textures.

Post-processing options like motion blur, vignette, camera lens flare, depth of field get the axe too. They're pretty lightweight but fuck those effects.

Texture quality/memory depends on the VRAM available.

AA depends on the quality. Always SMAA or TAA over FXAA. But if they're too blurry I'd rather play without AA and just supersample the resolution.

Shadow or Shadow Resolution is at least medium. Sometimes Low setting just deletes shadows. While I don’t care about shadow quality, it gives valuable info about enemies. Also some games simulate trees moving by wind. So moving shadow gives an authentic feeling. Don't care about high quality Nvidia GameWorks soft shadows since it’s indistinguishable to low quality low resolution shadow during gaming.

Lighting, Reflections and Ambient Occlusion is dependent on GPU budget and perceived quality. Sometimes God-rays are just too good to ignore. Sometimes reflection makes every surface like cheap mirrors. Sometimes there's no obvious difference between SSAO and HBAO/HDAO. Left to my discretion.

Ultimately I always fiddle with the graphics and as a byproduct I don’t play anything under 60 fps unless it’s locked to 30 but even then begrudgingly. Cause I can physically feel the input delay in sub-60 fps situations. Makes my skin crawl.

Good points there. These days I'm not a graphics bitch - I can lower the settings if it gives noticeable better FPS.

 

[mama]

60fps on whatever resolution you prefer/can do is a safe zone with respect to frame drops. As has been mentioned, 30fps is fine but you will notice frame drops. 40fps is better and you are unlikely to note any frame drops unless there is poor optimisation. 50-60fps will have you covered.

 

[Morgoth]

i prefer these days 60 a minium fps a must. living far long enough with slide shows...
1080p Ultra with 60 fps so lovly

 

[27MaD]

Were you able to play at 60fps gaming on your first PC

No, Never but the thing is once you get a PC that's capable of hitting 60 FPS almost always you're never going back to lower FPS gaming, At least that's for me.
I'd say it's an illusion.